Legends, upstarts at Black dance festival
Laura Elaine Ellis gets emotional when she talks about legacy.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about roots and the rippling effect of those roots,” the co-founder and co-producer of the Black Choreographers Festival says via Zoom between teaching classes at California State University East Bay in Hayward. “The intergenerational aspect is what I’m most excited about.”
This year’s festival, which opens Saturday, Feb. 11, marks BCF’s 19th year. But its history reaches back much further, to a festival called Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century, led by dance scholar Halifu Osumare in the 1990s. And to note that Ellis herself holds myriad connections to Black dance makers and the Bay Area institutions that support them is an understatement. Ellis has been a member of Oakland’s Dimensions Dance Theater, which just marked its 50th anniversary, since 1986, and has served as faculty at Cal State East Bay for nearly three decades.
Those deep, long-cultivated roots, combined with Ellis’ indefatigable passion for scouting new talents, show in this year’s programming. BCF’s opening performance is scheduled to be held for the first time at Cal State East Bay, co-sponsored by the university’s dance and theater department, and featuring graduates who have presented work at BCF over the past decade, ranging from young talents like Las Vegas’ Krystal Bates to local legends like Dimensions member Latanya d. Tigner.
The following weekend, Feb. 25-26 at Dance Mission Theater in San Francisco, is also expected to present living legends and upstarts side by side. “Doscongio,” a masterful 1998 solo by Robert Moses reset on a member of his company Robert Moses’ Kin, is likely to be the high point. But the festival lineup offers world premieres by recent Lines Ballet bachelor of fine arts graduate Natalya Shoaf and Lines Ballet Training Program participant Dazaun Soleyn, along with assured work by mature artists long associated with BCF, particularly Raissa Simpson and Gregory Dawson.
The styles of the dances
run the gamut from West African to hip-hop to ballet-infused contemporary technique, and the mix of individual aesthetics is very much the point. It wasn’t that many decades ago that Black choreographers were lumped together in a genre known as “Black dance,” a category BCF helped dismantle.
“We’re not a monolith,” Ellis stresses. “We’re all Black artists and we’ve all had very different experiences in this country, so we’re saying really different things. The trust is that the artists in the festival are telling the story that’s authentically theirs. I’m never going to curate the festival and say, ‘It’s not funky enough’ or ‘It’s not cool enough,’ or worst of all, ‘It’s not Black enough.’ ”
Indeed, despite the shift in public discussions of anti-racism since the protests of 2020, it matters that BCF is a space where choreographers can take risks, knowing they’re in conversation first and foremost with fellow Black artists.
“The festival gives me a level of safety to investigate what I’m experiencing as a Black womanist artist, to voice controversial thoughts,” says Simpson, director of Push Dance Company.
Her premiere this year, “Operative Words,” contemplates the backlash in Florida against Advanced Placement curriculums in African American studies.
“I wanted to know, what is the fear against anti-racism?” she says. “And what does that mean for Black people? We ask, you know, the governor of Florida and mainly white people who don’t want to see these courses what they think about them, but do we ask Black people?”
To that end, Simpson’s work will pass a microphone among six performers as they dialogue and dance.
Simpson is an example of how BCF not only honors legacy, but perpetuates it. Today, as director of Push, she is about to open a BIPOC sanctuary space inside newly renovated Push headquarters in downtown San Francisco. But more than a decade ago, she was a participant in BCF’s mentorship program, receiving regular feedback and guidance from Dimensions Dance Theater founder Deborah Vaughan. Simpson in turn became a BCF mentor herself, working with Shoaf, who plans to premiere a solo on the festival’s second weekend this year.
As Shoaf says, “It’s beautiful to come into a room and see Black art makers and visionaries and know they’re there with open arms.”
Shoaf notes that after her time in BCF’s mentorship program, Ellis and festival co-producer Kendra Kimbrough Barnes also helped her curate and produce a three-choreographer program of solos at regular BCF partner Safehouse for the Performing Arts. And BCF is sponsoring Shoaf to hold her next show at Berkeley’s Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in June, too.
In this way and many others, BCF’s work extends far beyond Black History Month. Having weathered the pandemic by offering outdoor classes, dance film showings and mini-residencies, Ellis is eager to keep expanding as BCF approaches its 20th year. The 2024 mentorship program, Ellis says, will start in July and include up to a month of free rehearsal space so participating artists can simply experiment and generate work before sharing it with mentors.
Meanwhile, you can spot Ellis at small theaters throughout the Bay Area, approaching dancers with that certain spark and asking, “Are you making your own work?”
“Let’s pick up and move forward, right?” Ellis says, wiping off sweat before heading to teach another dance class. “Because, you know, we can’t go back.”